osama bin laden is dead. mr. obama has also claimed that al-qaeda's core leadership is decimated, and who can forget during the first presidential run in 2008 when he vowed to root out al-qaeda, close guantanamo and improve america's moral stature around the world. then the drones came and the world sees us as merciless. merciless is what we should have been a long time ago in this conflict. new strategies and double talking generals reduced warfare to an academic exercise, shape shifting and parsing above the gravity of the enemy's threat, playing the stump master with slogans, anything to avoid saying outright what the average american knows. terrorists are alive and waiting for the big jihad payoff. why shouldn't they be when in 2009 the president announced that he was adding a token 30,000 u.s. troops to our afghan force at the same time he revealed his plan for a phased withdrawal. this was a courtesy to an al-qaeda and taliban actors who now had an expiration date for america's war. obama's heart was never